


baby, you light up my world (like nobody else)

by sifu_hotdamn



Series: the new MCU (Mothman!zuko Cinematic Universe) [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Adult Sokka, Adult Zuko, Crack Taken Seriously, It's not too bad, M/M, Meet-Cute, Modern AU, Sokka (Avatar) Has ADHD, Zuko is an Awkward Turtleduck, author's knowledge of entomology has been selectively sampled from in order to optimize gay whimsy, background katara/aang - Freeform, but non-graphic wilderness first aid happens, i said what i said, in that sokka hits zuko with his car, like. crack with appendices if you ask nicely, modern au is covid canon compliant, mothman!zuko au, rated t for situationally warranted swearing and mild horny thoughts, technically a meet-cute?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27297277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sifu_hotdamn/pseuds/sifu_hotdamn
Summary: They jerk their head around to face him, and, despite the painful ringing in his ears, Sokka quickly realizes several things.First: they definitely aren’t entirely human.Second: they look absolutely terrified.Third: are their pants...vibrating?[an unlikely mothman!zuko zukka meet-cute, with more moth facts by volume than anyone asked for]
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: the new MCU (Mothman!zuko Cinematic Universe) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993054
Comments: 29
Kudos: 80
Collections: Koi’s atla fic recs





	baby, you light up my world (like nobody else)

**Author's Note:**

> long-time reader, first-time writer, bursting onto the scene with a festive treat!
> 
> a biologist's note: zuko is 50% hawk moth, 50% man, not the fanged (???) cryptid of american folklore. the hawk moth species used as reference is Hyles lineata, if you'd like a visual. this decision was mostly made to optimize humor and personal delight. i'll have some end notes on the Science, where applicable.
> 
> the original idea for this story, and perpetual companionship down increasingly elaborate worldbuilding rabbit holes, came from the inimitable Mercy (autisticzukka on tumblr/ang3lba3 on ao3). i hope it sparks joy!
> 
> and, of course, lots of love to my bugboy bugbeta supreme, disabledzuko (ao3)

Sokka is frustrated with himself for not leaving Katara’s place sooner. He loves his sister, loves spending time in her and Aang’s new house, with their perfect garden and perfect dog and perfect little shared couple smiles. He’s happy for them, really! So happy that he stays too late every time, laughing along with all their shared jokes, tamping down the gnawing sense of parasitism in the back of his mind until he leaves to drive back to his empty bed in his empty city apartment, picked for its proximity to a job he now does from his couch and a once-thriving social scene that’s been closed down for nearly a year.

[“Are you sure you don’t want to move into our spare bedroom?” Katara had asked that evening. “I worry about you being on your own right now, and you’d save a lot on rent.” 

“You don’t have to worry about me so much, Katara,” he’d responded. “I can take care of myself.”

“Okay,” she’d said, clearly unconvinced, but he could hardly tell her that constant reminders that his brilliant baby sister has more of her shit together than he does would probably hurt him more than it’d help.]

So he’d stayed a bit too late, and now he’s driving back much later than he’d planned to in order to get a solid 8 hours of sleep, shower, and eat a nice breakfast before his Monday morning meeting. Of course, Katara and Aang had moved into one of those far-flung, dirt cheap, pseudo-suburban neighborhoods designed for broke millennials who still crave the validation of home ownership, so twenty minutes in to the seventy minute drive, all he’s seen are trees, more trees, and the occasional half-empty strip mall. 

He’s scanning through the radio, trying to find a station that’s not hopelessly staticky this far out of town, and debating whether or not the boost of mediocre gas station coffee would be worth sleeping like shit tonight, when something clips the front of his truck with a massive THUMP, followed by what sounds like a loud expletive. 

Fuck, did he just hit a person?

He pulls over immediately. _Tui and La,_ the slouched, shadowy figure that’s weaving towards the woods in his rearview mirror sure looks human-sized. He grabs his phone and first aid kit, grateful he carries one stocked for actual emergencies instead of a standard-issue glorified bag of band-aids, and hops out of the truck, jogging towards them. 

“Hey, I’m really sorry, I didn’t see you there at all. Are you okay?” he asks, only freaking out a little. “Well, duh, you’re obviously not okay, I just hit you with my fucking car. Can I give you a ride to the hospital or something?” 

They still don’t turn around, wobbling into the woods at a resolute pace. As he draws closer, he notices that they sound like they’re breathing really heavily, and seem to be wearing some kind of...stripy trench coat? 

“Hey, can you hear me?” he continues, finally close enough to reach out and touch their shoulder, which feels...fluffy? “Do you need medical attention?” A shrill, teakettle-like noise seemingly erupts from the figure, with such jarring force that Sokka’s knocked off-balance and stumbles into a tree. They jerk their head around to face him, and, despite the painful ringing in his ears, Sokka quickly realizes several things.

First: they definitely aren’t entirely human.

Second: they look absolutely terrified.

Third: are their pants... _vibrating?_

“Hey, it’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you,” Sokka manages to grit out, dropping the first aid kit and raising both hands in what he really hopes is a universal gesture. “I just wanted to see if you needed help? You were moving like you were injured.” 

The din eases up a bit, as the mothman’s gleaming golden eyes dart down to where the kit’s fallen, and then back up to Sokka’s face. In the faint light from the road, he can see that they’re using the lower of their two sets of arms - _add that to the laundry list of weird shit for him to process later_ \- to press down on their right thigh, which is bleeding pretty badly. He nods towards the kit. 

“I can use that to help with your leg, if you’ll just sit down and please stop making that noise?”

They grimace, clearly not thrilled at the prospect, but still nod back in agreement. Without shifting their gaze from him, they gingerly extend their massive, dusky wings so that they can sink to the ground against a tree. Sokka’s almost too distracted by those _wings_ to notice when the terrible sound finally fades out completely - wait, did their pants just stop vibrating? He has so, _so_ many questions. 

“Okay, I’m just gonna...pick this up, and come over there. D’you think you can get your pants off for me?” They glare at him, affronted. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I just need to be able to see what’s bleeding.” They continue glaring at him with their enormous golden eyes, but begrudgingly push their jeans down to their knees. 

Sokka walks over slowly, telegraphing his motions as he kneels down, mostly because he doesn’t want them to get spooked and start up that ungodly pants-shrieking _(seriously, what the fuck)_ again. Thankfully, the wound is only a few inches long, and not terribly deep - the skin must’ve just split with the force of the impact - but it’s still bleeding a lot, so he pulls some clean gauze out of the kit and uses it to apply pressure. Sokka’s glad that his dads covered a wilderness first aid course as a condition of a backpacking trip graduation gift, citing some paternal paranoia about his _‘near-uncanny accident homing mechanism’_.

“So I’m just gonna keep pressing down on this until the blood clots, okay? Wait - dumb question, but your, like, blood or whatever clots, right?” 

The mothman huffs out a pained laugh and rolls their eyes. 

“Yeah, my _‘blood or whatever’_ clots fine,” they answer drily, and holy shit, the mothman’s voice is...sexy, actually? Deep, and pleasantly raspy, and clearly annoyed with him - right, he’s trying to keep this _moth-human hybrid_ from _bleeding out in the woods,_ after Sokka _hit them with his truck, like an asshole,_ so he should probably table this for later.

“Okay, good,” he replies. 

The silence that follows is almost tangibly awkward, and Sokka takes the opportunity to examine them more closely. The mothman’s face is mostly human-like, with dark, shaggy hair framing shimmering golden eyes that are slightly too large to belong to a person. They have a long white antenna extending from the right side of their forehead, where an eyebrow might normally be - they’re missing their left antenna, though, probably because of whatever accident left that massive, discolored scar around their left eye. 

They’re rather pretty, in an unsettling sort of way. 

They’re wearing some kind of shaggy white sweater; thankfully, they’d had briefs on under their jeans. The bit of their thigh that he can feel around the edges of the compress is soft and velvety, and he has to fight the impulse to stroke it with his fingertips, because _again, Sokka, now is really not the time; do you even know their name –_

“My name’s Sokka; what’s yours?” he blurts. “Wait, you do, like, have a name, right?” _Smooth. Real smooth._

They smirk at him, twitching their antenna upwards in a way that’s oddly reminiscent of how Katara raises an eyebrow at him when he’s being a dumbass.

“Yeah, it’s Zuko,” they answer bemusedly. Sokka shifts to rest more of his weight on the compress, and their face shifts to a grimace and they groan in a way that’s _definitely_ not distracting at all. “Fuck, that hurts.”

“Yeah, sorry,” he replies - you’re supposed to keep people distracted in these situations so that they don’t freak out and go into shock, right? “So, Zuko...what are your pronouns? I mean, do moths even have a concept of gender? It’d be, like, super valid if they didn’t, since it’s all just a shitty human social construct anyways, and I guess there’s no need for pronouns if you don’t use spoken language to communicate – wait, moths don’t have spoken language, right?” 

He glances up at Zuko, whose expression looks more confused than pained now - hey, that’s progress, right? - and then realizes that he’d started absentmindedly petting Zuko’s unfairly pettable, surprisingly muscular thigh mid-ramble. 

“Ah, shit, I’m sorry,” he says quickly, jerking his fingertips away, not really recognizing the emotion that flickers across their face. “I’m a nervous rambler, and a nervous fidgeter, and I’m really, really sorry for hitting you with my car, and I really hope you don’t die just because I’m a lonely idiot who stayed at my sister’s place too late—”

“Hey,” Zuko interrupts, probably out of some combination of mercy and desperation to shut him up. “People usually assume I’m a guy, so if you wanna stick with that, it’s fine.” He shrugs. “And mothmen are kinda the red-headed stepchildren of moth society, so we don’t know much about their...cultural systems? Mostly they communicate with pheromones, but they’re pretty crass, so I try not to scent with them unless I have to,” he continues, delicately sniffing the air in a way that’s really unfairly cute. “Like, about twenty yards east of here, there’s a blackberry bramble that’s kinda the local moth Tinder, and - _ugh_ \- they are _not_ subtle about it.”

“...Huh,” Sokka muses. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” He lifts up the edge of the compress, and is relieved to find that the bleeding’s mostly stopped. “Okay, it looks like this is ready to get cleaned out. There’s some sterile water, dilute iodine solution, and a syringe we can use for pressure rinsing in the kit - fair warning, though, it’s gonna sting. D’you wanna do it, or should I?”

“Could you?” Zuko asks. “I just– I flinch pretty badly, so you’re probably gonna have to sit on my legs so I don’t kick you–”

“Sure, alright,” Sokka agrees, as he grabs a pair of gloves, the bottles, and the syringe. He swings one leg over Zuko’s lap, settling in above his knees, and bids a fond farewell to his last chance of retaining any dignity, because _Tui and La, his thighs—_

It requires near-superhuman focus, but Sokka manages to put on the gloves, unwrap the syringe, and load the water. 

“Okay, bud, you ready for this?” He’s met with a tense nod. “Alright, here goes.”

To Zuko’s credit, he manages to keep most of the flinching under control, and doesn’t make too much noise, outside of periodic muffled expletives.

“So we have a few options now that it’s clean - I’m guessing the hospital isn’t an option?”

Zuko fixes him with a sardonic look. 

“So we could try butterfly sutures - heh, that’s a good one,” he chuckles, as Zuko rolls his eyes, “but they probably wouldn’t work very well, given your, uh…fuzz situation. The lighting here’s too shitty for me to offer to stitch you up normally, and I don’t even know if that’d mesh with your healing process. I think superglue might be our best bet?”

“So for starters, my _scales_ are not a _fuzz situation,_ thank you _kindly_ ,” Zuko declares indignantly. “And why the hell would you want to _glue_ my leg?”

“Oh, _pardon me_ ,” Sokka drawls. “Butterfly sutures either wouldn’t stick to your _scales_ very well, or they’d stick _super well_ and then _yank a bunch of them out_ the first time you tried to move. And superglue’s a classic wound closure tool in wilderness medicine! But by all means, if you know of _some other option,_ do let me know.” 

“Fine,” Zuko says, harrumphing. “Glue me up, doc.”

—

Zuko is exhausted. At least his cut’s finally closed up now, following a tricky half hour-long glue-wrangling process, which all four of his arms proved extremely useful for. Sokka, who’s now taking a breather against a nearby tree, kept apologizing for hitting him, but it wasn’t really _Sokka’s_ fault that most of the uninhabited clearings a mothman with an eight-foot wingspan could find to land in these days were on the shoulders of low-traffic roadways, and he’d really just barely bumped into Zuko’s leg with the edge of his truck. He would’ve said as much, but Sokka was so _embarrassed_ about it, and it was just so _adorable—_

Yeah, he’s a desperately touch-starved, five and a half-foot tall human hawk moth, so _sue him_ if he’d wanted the pretty boy who was tenderly holding his thigh to keep blushing like that. 

His stomach rumbles loudly. Spirits, right, he’d been looking for breakfast before this whole situation spun out of control. Sokka’s startled by the sound, but pieces it together admirably quickly.

“Hey, d’you need something to eat?” Sokka asks, scratching his head and yawning a bit. “What do mothmen even eat, anyways?”

“Yeah, I’m starving,” Zuko admits. “And given the, uh, proboscis situation, I’m kind of on a permanent liquid diet? But no dairy, so that makes things...complicated. Lots of smoothies, juice, sports drinks - any calorie-dense liquid, really.”

“...huh, okay, guess that tracks,” Sokka says. “I probably have a can of soda rolling around in my car somewhere - would that work?”

“I mean, it might tide me over for a bit, but I’m a full-grown adult, so I’m gonna need more pretty soon. I think I sprained something in my wings trying to dodge you last-second, so between that and my leg, I’m not super mobile right now, and I’m trying to figure out what the hell I’m gonna do about that.” He pulls his jeans back on, and _oof_ , there’s definitely some pretty gnarly bruising around that cut. 

(He’ll be fine! He’s a strong, independent, semi-immobilized cryptid with a digestive tract specialized for no naturally occurring circumstances, with no cash on hand and no allies within hobbling distance! He’s definitely not just going to die in the woods because his dad nerfed his depth perception a decade ago and he’s been shit at night landings ever since!)

“Hey, so feel free to turn me down if this sounds weird,” Sokka chimes in, emerging from his own reverie. “Like, our first interaction was me nearly killing you - again, super sorry about that - so if you don’t really trust me, that’s, like, super fair - but do you want to crash at my place until you’ve healed up a bit? I live alone, so it’s not like anybody else would notice, and I should probably make sure that your cut doesn’t get infected or anything, anyways, right? You can just hang out and watch TV on my couch or whatever, and I’ll make sure you have all the protein shakes and sugar water your heart desires. It’s really the least I can do, considering.” 

_Spirits_ , but the open eagerness he’s watching Zuko with would make Zuko’s wings flutter if it wouldn’t hurt so badly. Sure, there’s a non-zero chance that he could get murdered, but Sokka seems sincere, and the odds of him making it on his own like this for more than a day are slim enough to be fairly convincing.

And hey, if it gets weird, he’ll just borrow Sokka’s phone and call Uncle, who’ll call in a favor or something and get him picked up within a few days. He could probably do that now, but Sokka’s eyes are really, _really_ blue, and he’s so _nice_ , and Zuko just wants to know if the buzzed sides of his hair would be as soft to run his fingers through as he suspects—

“Yeah, that’d work. Now can we please go find your weird car soda before I starve to death?” He’s mostly joking. “I’m gonna need a hand up, unless you want all your hard work ripped open.”

“Yeah, gimme a sec,” Sokka says, smiling brilliantly, and Zuko’s heart _melts_. He walks back over, tucking leftover first aid supplies back into the kit and shoving the trash into his pockets, before reaching down and helping Zuko up. He miscalculates the force needed enough that Zuko has to quickly, _painfully_ wing-flap so that he doesn’t knock them both over, but that leaves him _so irresistibly close_ to Sokka’s face, and _Spirits_ , he’s blushing again—

and then Zuko puts his full weight back on his right leg, which might not be bleeding anymore, but still hurts like a _bitch._ He swears loudly, grabbing onto Sokka’s waist with two free hands to keep himself upright. _Oh, real smooth,_ he thinks, and yanks his hands away before he can do something even weirder.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Sokka says, graciously ignoring whatever the _hell_ that was and moving over to his right side. He takes Zuko’s top right arm, resting it on his shoulder, and then wraps his lower right arm back around his waist. “Better?” 

Zuko leans on him experimentally.

“Yeah, loads better, thanks.” He takes a deep breath in, feeling his sides swell with air, and together they make the slow, painful march back to Sokka’s truck.

“Here, let me pop down the tailgate so you can sit,” Sokka says, leaving Zuko to perch on the back of the truck while he loudly rifles around in the cab. He returns with a cheek-splitting grin and a dinged-up can of generic brand cola - Zuko’s pretty sure the side reads ‘Dr. Fine Soda’? 

“Allow me to present the evening’s hors d'oeuvre,” Sokka proclaims loftily, cracking open the can and making a funny little half-bow. Zuko, too hungry to bother with either manners or banter at this point, simply uncoils his four foot long tongue and shotguns it.

It tastes absolutely disgusting.

He’s _really_ glad that Sokka can’t smell moth pheromones.

—

Sokka’s been driving for nearly twenty minutes by the time he finds a gas station that’s still open. He hops out of the cab, saying, “I’ll be back in five, yeah?” and heads for the front door, which has an obnoxiously large “CASH ONLY” sign posted. _La’s fins_ , he never carries cash. He digs through his wallet, finding a wrinkly five and a couple coins. Alright, time to figure out how many liquid calories he can convert that into.

He returns to the truck with two gallons of red fruit punch and a cup of tragically burnt coffee. He tries to walk loudly enough that Zuko won’t get startled - they may be on better terms now, but that was a _memorable_ first impression - and courteously knocks on the tailgate, before opening it and sliding the juice-adjacent beverages inside. Zuko hasn’t moved around much since they’d left the woods, after ten minutes of tetris-style troubleshooting led them to conclude that the only way to avoid damaging his wings, further injuring his leg, or letting him get blown out of the back of the truck on the highway was for him to lie belly-down in the truck bed with his wings tucked in and a tarp tied overhead. He peers owlishly back at Sokka from the front of the bed, where he’s propped himself up on his elbows on Sokka’s spare tire.

“Your dinner is served, my liege,” Sokka deadpans. Zuko rolls his eyes and grabs the bottles. “Seriously, though, I know you’re not gonna be comfortable, per se, but are you doing okay? Need to use the little caterpillar’s room?”

“I’m bored, but fine.” Zuko shrugs, and then winces. Right, the wing sprain. “How much longer do we have left?”

“Under half an hour, but it’s pretty smooth going. If you’re set, we should probably head out before the cashier starts looking at me funny.” Zuko nods, and starts unscrewing one of the bottles as Sokka closes the tailgate. The last thing he hears before getting back into the cab is a near-obscene slurping from under the tarp, which sets a _great_ tone for the next half-hour of free-range driving thoughts. What that mouth do, indeed.

Thankfully, by the time Sokka parks outside his apartment, he’s managed to focus just long enough to make a general plan for navigating Zuko’s convalescence. For the first time in months, he appreciates Piandao’s ongoing work-from-home directive for a reason that isn’t just “daytime pajamas.” He grabs the leftover tofu curry that Katara packaged up for him - it might be vegan, but hey, it’s still food he doesn’t have to cook - and heads around to untie the tarp. Zuko perks up immediately, pushing himself up to stand in the truck bed, and wait, is he - _vibrating?_

“Oh, _hi_ , Sokka! So I checked the label on that _awesome_ juice you brought back after I finished it, and, uh, just so you know, my mom always said that Red Dye #40 made mothmen like, kinda hyper, apparently? Hey, that’s a funny thing - if you’re not supposed to say ‘fireman’ or ‘mailman’ anymore, why are we still ‘moth-men’, huh? Shouldn’t we be, like, ‘moth-people’? Or, wait -” and there’s a concerning shine in his massive eyes, which are so dilated that his golden irises are barely visible - _“humoths?”_

“Alright, let’s go get you some water, buddy,” Sokka says, helping him down from the truck and into the apartment. He’s _really_ glad his neighbors are morning people. “Heh, that’s funny, no bug juice for the bug boy.” He guides Zuko to a stool in the kitchen, where he perches, humming tunelessly at a frantic pace. Sokka puts the leftover curry in the fridge, and then fills a pitcher with water. “What’s the, like, optimal range for you to drink this from?”

“Oh, I can get it from here!” Zuko announces cheerfully, opening his jaw wider than any human possibly could, popping out his massive tongue coil - _seriously, how the hell does that even fit in his mouth?_ \- and unfurling it directly into Sokka’s chest with surprising force. He starts...giggling, Sokka thinks? It’s not a particularly human noise, more whistle than laugh. He recovers enough to try and drink, but he’s still shaking badly enough that his aim’s off, so his proboscis glances off the side of the pitcher and hits Sokka’s arm, making him start giggling all over again, and the whole situation’s just _so fucking weird_ that Sokka can’t _not_ join in. 

Eventually, Sokka manages to catch his breath enough to set the pitcher on the floor - Zuko’s probably got a better shot at making a fixed target, and Sokka would rather not get accidentally groped again, because then his traitorous, horny brain might get _more_ ideas about getting _deliberately_ groped, and Zuko’s absolutely off his tits on food dye, so now is _really not the time—_

A loud slurping noise interrupts Sokka’s spiral, and he glances up in time to see Zuko empty the pitcher. Sokka refills it, and sets it back down. “So, uh, did your mom happen to mention how long dye would make you...goofy for, exactly?” Zuko finishes off the second pitcher, and rolls up his proboscis, looking thoughtful.

“Huh, I’m not sure, actually!” he says, and then excitedly spins himself around on the stool so fast that his wings catch in the air a bit, making him yelp in alarm.

Sokka goes over to him, reaching out and taking Zuko’s arm to help stabilize him. The water hitting his system and the sudden shock of pain seem to be popping the sugar-dye-high bubble somewhat, because Zuko’s looking a bit less loopy and a bit more uncomfortable.

“Do you want to take something for that sprain? I’m not sure which human anti-inflammatories work on moth-people, but I definitely have ibuprofen and naproxen in the bathroom cupboard.” 

Zuko tears his gaze away from his intent observation of Sokka’s hand, which is still resting on his arm. _Tui’s left whisker,_ Sokka hadn’t even realized he was still touching him –

“Y-yeah, two ibuprofen and some more water or something would be...great, actually,” Zuko says, sounding a bit dazed. “Do you have something I could use to grind the pills up with? So I can, y’know,” and he gestures vaguely upwards towards his face.

“Sure, just gimme a sec,” Sokka says, and retrieves the bottle of pills from his bathroom. He has to rifle through his kitchen cupboards to find the mortar and pestle, and grabs a carton of hippie veggie stock (thanks, Aang) while he’s at it, hoping that it’ll help balance out the two gallons of artificially dyed liquid sugar in Zuko’s system. He sets his supplies out on the kitchen counter, next to where Zuko’s still perched.

Sokka knocks two pills into the mortar, after taking one himself - it’s been a hell of a night - and starts grinding.

“Hey, you don’t have to do that for me, y’know,” Zuko interrupts. “I can take care of myself.”

Sokka feels a twinge in his chest. He remembers telling Katara the same lie five hours ago, and how little he’d meant it; how much it was driven by shame at being caught needing help that he couldn’t possibly deserve.

Maybe Zuko’s gotten used to being lonely, too.

“Hey, listen, yeah?” Sokka says gently, catching Zuko’s golden gaze. “You can’t take care of yourself right now, and that’s mostly my fault, and I still feel like shit about it. Can you please let me help you, for the sake of shutting up my conscience a bit if nothing else?”

Zuko’s defensiveness seems to waver a bit, and he nods silently, pressing his lips together tightly.

Sokka half-nods in acknowledgement, and returns to grinding up the pills. He eventually reaches over to grab a tall mug from the cupboard behind Zuko, sneaking a glance up at him.

It might just be the light, but Zuko’s gorgeous eyes are shining a bit more brightly. 

Something deep in Sokka’s chest absolutely _burns._

—

Zuko is fading into comfortable drowsiness by the time Sokka offers to set up the couch for him. 

“Somewhere enclosed might be better,” Zuko suggests.

Sokka pauses, looking pensive, before brightening up and leading him by the hand into the bedroom - and Zuko’s going to hang onto that memory for _a while_ , even if he’d rather forget most of the rest of this humiliating spectacle as soon as possible - before coming to a halt in front of his open closet door. 

“Would this work? I can put down some blankets, maybe grab you a pillow?” _Spirits,_ Sokka’s just so _nice_ , what the _hell._

Instead of throwing himself at Sokka, as impulse would dictate, he takes a deep breath and replies, “Yeah, that’d be...perfect, actually.”

“Only one request, yeah?” Sokka adds, with a distinctly weird look in his eye. “If you get snacky during the night, can you go for that heinous green sweater first? Gran-Gran bought it for my birthday two years ago, and has asked me about it every time we’ve seen each other since, and I don’t know how to break it to her that that isn’t _anybody’s_ color–”

Zuko briefly considers explaining moth taxonomy and developmental stages to this gorgeous goofball at 4:30 in the morning, but thankfully catches himself, instead replying, “...I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

Sokka returns shortly with an armful of blankets and some pillows. “Hey, so you shouldn’t really get your leg wet, and I’m not sure how...waterproof you are, but I can grab you a change of clothes if you wanna kinda...sponge off before you sleep?”

“Yeah, that’d probably be smart.” Zuko really just wants to sleep, but he _is_ covered in blood, dirt, and half a forest floor’s worth of detritus.

Sokka grabs some clothing from his drawers, and Zuko takes it and heads to the bathroom. He does his best to clean himself off with a washcloth, even though his long, fluffy torso scales are about as easy to wipe down as a shag carpet, blots himself dry, and puts on the clean boxers and pants. He forgoes the t-shirt, chuckling quietly to himself - what did Sokka think he was going to do with that, exactly? - and returns to the bedroom. Sokka’s sitting on his bed, messing around on his phone.

“What should I do with these?” Zuko asks, vaguely gesturing with the hand he’s carrying his truly disgusting jeans in.

“Oh, I can pop those in the wash now, actually,” Sokka replies, finally glancing up. “Do you want me to wash your...sweater, or whatever, while I’m at it?”

“Huh?” Zuko says, intelligently. He looks down. “Oh, uh, you mean my scales? They’re kinda...attached to my body, so I’ll pass.”

“Oh! R-right. Huh. Wow.” Sokka flushes a deep red and grabs the clothes from him, practically sprinting out of the room.

Zuko, too tired to parse whatever the _hell_ just happened, tosses the blankets in the bottom of the closet, closes himself inside, and falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> children's fun fact science corner time!
> 
> -Zuko's junk screaming is extrapolated from an actual anti-bat hawk moth defense system - they rub their genital claspers (yes, for That Kind Of Clasping) together in a way that produces ultrasound, which signal jams bat sonar. it's fascinating stuff.  
> -moths communicate via pheromones, mostly about sex or food (as far as we know), which is why Zuko called them crass. as far as I could tell after 30 minutes of research, humans don't have scent receptors for these compounds, so we wouldn't be able to smell them specifically.  
> -to the best of my knowledge, this is responsible wilderness first aid practice. you should, of course, seek professional medical attention when it is available to you, and not refer to the anecdotal accounts of an ao3 user named "sifu_hotdamn" in the case of an actual emergency.  
> -hawk moths have incredibly long probosces, often specialized for pollination of specific plants! google "hawk moth feeding" to see what that mouth do in action. (it's also pretty cute! they're objectively adorably fluffy moths!)  
> -Zuko's mouth situation is an Eldritch horror that I actually sketched out a deeply unsettling sagittal diagram of on the back of an envelope to explain it to myself. explaining it will likely be an upcoming plot point, but in the meantime: yes, he has soft lips for kissing; no, he does not have teeth or a tongue or standard inside-the-mouth situation. bugs breathe through their sides, not their mouths, so his mouth is just a fancy proboscis storage unit.  
> -the food dye bit is not based on science at all. i'm so sorry to disappoint. it's just an idea that i had at 3am that made me laugh so hard that i couldn't bring myself to take it out.  
> -wool-eating moths are larval stage (caterpillars) from the family Tineidae. as an adult half-hawk moth (family Sphingidae), Zuko could not nom on sweaters, no matter how nicely Sokka asked him to.
> 
> if you would like further clarification, feel free to comment! if you are an annoyed entomologist, i am very sorry. (if you are a cool entomologist...let's chat)


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